You weren’t supposed to ride the metro, you weren’t supposed to hug or kiss your friends, you weren’t supposed to visit public spaces, and nobody was telling us exactly why. It was day five of the swine flu outbreak, and we had spent the week hanging out at crowded understaffed hospitals, funerals, poor neighborhoods, and vapid press conferences. It was time to get out of the city, before the fear became more dangerous than the disease.
The way out for me and my girlfriend Benedicte was a weekend trip to El Perote, the center of a massive network of Smithfield owned industrial pig farms and the site of the earliest known case of the swine flu. It was clearly the next chapter in the swine flu story.
It felt great to leave the last infinite sprawl of Mexico city for pine covered mountain passes. But as we dropped into the valley where El Perote is located things felt strange. 125 feedlots dotted a barren plain like so many identical towns in the fading light. Smithfield moved in here on the tails of NAFTA, but things really got out of control over the last few years when they realized in Mexico, they could do whatever they wanted and went on a farm building spree. A million pigs now lived here.
Benedicte knew of a local activist in La Gloria, a small town where the first case of swine flu was recorded. In the orange light of his Virgin Mary shrine Guadalupe Gaspar, a middle aged farmer who had recently been jailed for organizing a protest against the feedlots told us about the increasing illness in local communities. Thousands had become sick this year, and dozens had died. This was it’s own story, but the international media only cared about Edgar the first diagnosed case of swine flu in the world. After becoming a minor celebrity he was asked off on a “vacation” by the governor.
The governor had also started paving the road in front of Edgar’s house fixed up the towns run down clinic, started a soup kitchen serving 3 free meals a day, and brought in a gourmet coffee truck to keep the campesinos appeased. But this is how they roll here in Mexico, if you can’t beat them, buy them. Gaspar wasn’t eating at the soup kitchen, he was moire interested in making his case to the news media, about how Smithfield farm’s had destroyed his community.
The only problem was, the media wasn’t interested. In a 24 hour news cycle the cause of something pales besides the next dramatic symptom. Do we care why there is so much breast cancer, do we care why our financial system melted down. No, we care about the victims, and there was no more swine flu victims in La Gloria.
The next day we set out on our own to document the Smithfield presence in the area. We starred out at stagnant ponds of pig excrement and listened to the constant rush of food down metal pipes into the packed warehouses, but we didn’t have much time to enjoy our first look at industrial farming before security detained us, and forced us to follow an angry PR hack who was showing a french journalist their “model farm” before flying him via helicopter to their private lab to “prove” the swine flu didn’t come from his farms. “Look” the PR guy said, rushing us around. “No flies, no smell, everything is fine here.”
Since the beginning of the outbreak Smithfield farms and the Mexican government have sought to turn the world’s eyes away from industrial farming as the cause of the swine flu. Even going so far as to say it was impossible that the swine flu originated in factory farms. Since then scientists have traced the disease to a 1990’s influenza from North Carolina factory farms proving industrial farms breed the disease. The only question that remains is, how did it get from pigs to humans. Smithfield farms has blamed the outbreaks on locals raising pigs for the family. Gasper and a lot of scientists think it is a lot more likely that the strain jumped from the factory farms to local communities.
The next day Gerardo, Gaspar’s son showed us the sites our PR guided tour had forgotten to include.
Driving quickly across farming roads to avoid security, we saw numerous manure ponds with no plastic sheeting stopping the toxic waste from entering the ground, we saw piles of drugs used to treat the sick pigs, some was burnt, some lying in gullies, we saw three acre size ponds of pig shit that had been driven up into the nearby hills and dumped in ravines that turned to streams in the wet season, we saw a well that Smithfield had promised a community who agreed to have a feedlot next door. The community was never given access to the well and was forced to use shallow wells polluted by the feedlot. The last thing we saw was concrete death pits. Concrete rooms in the ground where diseased and dead pigs are dumped and left to rot. Burning them would be too expensive.
Everything was not fine here.
We left soon after, because security was arriving. We had seen enough. Enough to promise each other to never eat industrial grown pork again. And enough to be convinced that the fast and loose way Smithfield farms was operating had created the perfect conditions to create the swine flu, and to pass it to humans.
There is a good chance that the swine flu did not originate at these factory farms, a credible theory places the birth of the disease in Asia. Yet no one can argue that the El Perote industrial farms are a prime suspect. So why is there no international team investigating the farms, why has the Mexican government refused to grant access to an University study on the industrial farms, why does the mainstream media not care about the cause of the disease that has costs the world billions of dollars and helped drive the recession further towards a depression?
And it may be too late to find out the truth. The trail of swine flu antibodies that can prove if the disease had been in a certain human or pig has gone cold and we are left not knowing. Which is right where the Government and Pork lobby seem to want us.
Yet even if there is never any proof found, the lesson was clear to us as we drove back home to Mexico City. The cost of cheap pork is a new breed of mega diseases. Theses diseases will not decimate mankind as the our sensational media likes to imply, but perhaps the Swine Flu offers us all the chance to ask the question, is it worth it, or is their another way.

The Swine Flu has cost the world billions and governments are bracing for a more virulent comeback in the fall. But still no independent investigation has looked into the factory farming as the cause. Biochemist Carlos Arias is investigating the case for the independent Mexican university UNAM, but according to a well written AP article he has no luck in getting the government provide details about its tests on humans and pigs. Is it a cover up, or just incompetence?

New York Times has a good article out on the source of the Swine Flu, which is slipping away day by day. They critic the tests done on Smithfield farms by the government, while noting that a team from the National Autonomous University of Mexico is doing its own investigation of industrial hog farming in his state. The study should take months. UNAM is an extremely independent authority, but it remains to be seen if they will have the access, and test samples they need to do any kind of conclusive testing.

In May, the Mexican government said it had tested pigs on the Veracruz farms and found them free of the virus. Smithfield Foods, an owner of the farms, and the National Pork Producers Council, the industry’s lobbying arm, were quick to publicize that announcement.But outside veterinary experts still disagree on whether those tests proved anything. According to Smithfield, Mexican government veterinarians tested snout swabs taken on April 30 and blood samples stored since January. But since the human outbreak in Veracruz is believed to have started in February, many veterinary experts said testing pig snouts for live virus in April proved nothing. Any pig sick in February would have long since recovered and, since hogs are usually slaughtered at 6 months old, many of those alive in early February would be bacon by April.

I just arrived back in Mexico in time to see the Swine Flu reach the level of 6. A Pandemic. But it doesn’t mean so much anymore. But for Mexico it’s too late. The Swine Flu has effectivlely thrust this country and it’s conservative bankers into the reality of the “finanical crisis.”

I’m outside of Mexico, but still keeping tabs on the situation, and will resume reporting in June.The WSJ recites a Smithfield press release here saying there was never any swineflu on their farms.What a surprise. just as they said.

This on the other hand is interesting: Time.com reports on the first legal action against Smithfield. It may be premature, but it’s the kind of pressure that needs to happen to clear the air.

A good article in the Washington Post about Perote and Smithfield farms.

Health officials have found no connection between the pig farms, owned and operated by Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, and the flu virus that paralyzed Mexico for much of the past two weeks. But the crisis, which appears to be abating, has inflamed tensions between the world’s largest hog producer and the poor neighboring communities here that have long warned that the farms are a danger to their health.

And they never will find a “connection”, but that does not mean the outbreak did not start in Veracruz. There will be studies done, but without an international team that can invest serious time, the reuslts will be suspect, by most Mexicans, and the world.

On a good note, politicians are backtracking on their support for the farms, and the complaints of local communities are being heard.

The company’s CEO said the team, and a pending series of genetic tests on hogs raised at the massive Granjas Carroll operation, would likely clear Smithfield of any involvement in the spawning or spread of swine flu.

C. Larry Pope said Smithfield hired consultants from the University of Minnesota and North Carolina State University to be “an extra set of eyes.”

“We want an open process here because we feel like this is something we have absolutely no responsibility for, and there is no one in the world who says we do except a couple of locals who have started something,” Pope said, referring to villagers in La Gloria, a town near the Mexican hog farm. “We find a little boy in southern Mexico who gets sick, there happens to be a Smithfield facility close to that, boom, we have the linkage by some people’s standards.”

The New York Times has an impressive article on how Smithfield Farms has impacted Eastern Europe.

The connections between the Carrol Farms complexes in Veracruz and the Swine Flu outbreak is still not proven. It remains a powerful possibility, supposedly independent test are due to come out in 12 days according to press releases. However there is still no international group independently investigating the possibility of Smithfield farms being the location the virus came from. The Mexican government also continues to state that none of it’s pigs have the Swine Flu. This is dubious as best, especially considering how little testing has been done.